Widows' Gate
by ricebol
Summary: Some deaths come without blood or pain or anyone to mourn. Dan in the city, Post-GN-Movie hybridverse.


**Summary:** Some deaths come without blood or pain or anyone to mourn.  
**Notes:** Originally a captcha fill('gatepost widows'), but it got long and I like it so it's getting its own post.  
**Rating/Warnings:** PG. Post-GN/Movie canon!verse, so: depressing.  
**Characters/Pairings:** Dan, random OC.  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine.

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**widows' gate**

.

It's just a chainlink barrier, a temporary block put up in an attempt by what was left of the police force to keep order, to keep the public away from the creature at ground zero, to keep people _alive_. It's old, and has seen riots and explosions and fires, the metal links blackened in places, twisted in others, and the wheels it's been run out on catch and snag and don't always roll straight. It's strung through along the top in orange caution tape, and the segments are attached to each other with padlocks where the pinioning joints have failed.

It was meant to be temporary, but the city mayor has ordered it stay exactly where it is, indefinitely. The chief of police didn't argue – his wife's photograph was already in amongst the rest, clipped to the wire like a wall of pinned butterflies, multifaceted wings rising and falling in the wind in rippling waves of color and pain and loss.

In melodramatic circles it's becoming known as the Widows' Gate, this section of protective barrier, but really there are widows and widowers alike here, orphans and the suddenly, unbearably childless, brothers and sisters and cousins and people from out of town, from all over the country, come to pin folded faces in amongst countless others. They leave no flowers, no candles, no cards or tokens – just an endless mosaic of every face that stood between Adrian and his unfathomable knot.

Laurie doesn't know he's here; she'd been napping on the couch, wrung out and sick from another day of digging for survivors and finding only rubble and bodies too far gone for anything but dental identification. He isn't faring much better, but there are these things that need to be done. The people here are watching each other with glazed eyes, tracing the paths of hands and pictures and fingers running over wire, and maybe they're still in too much shock to just post their losses and walk away, make these things official, make them _real_. Maybe they're just looking for pain that trumps or at least matches their own, for the shallow, scab-picking comfort it brings. Maybe.

No one looks at him twice when he clips up Hollis's picture; the ages are right, the man could have been his father. The newspaper clipping, though, from the day after the arrest – the only photograph he has of the man under the mask – draws stares, even through the dead-eyed haze of communal grief.

He's not concerned with stares. Turns to leave. Feels a hand snag his sleeve.

It's a teenage boy, a picture of a middle-aged woman held in one trembling hand. His mother, probably. His eyes are red-rimmed but narrowed in curiosity, and Dan suddenly feels an overwhelming rush of envy for the young and their resiliency. "You… you knew him, really?"

Dan just nods, carefully extricating his sleeve from the boy's grip.

"The other one's Mr. Mason. It's the same one from his book. Are you… are you Nite Owl?"

_Not anymore,_ he could answer. _Used to be._

_Even if I was, I couldn't tell you._

_…Yes. _

And god, he could be. The city still has plenty of problems that need fixing and he doubts the police would have the time to come after him, arrest him, drag him away for trying to get people to water, shelter, save the injured and ill from the worst things crawling in the night. He could go home tonight, put on the armor, become someone important again, someone making a difference.

Become…

He's shaking his head in the negative before he even realizes it, though, because it was Hollis that made him Nite Owl and while Laurie may have lured him back into that skin it was Rorschach who kept him in it, well after the jailbreak and the long, long hours at the bottom of the river; after there'd been plenty of time for all of the consequences to sink in. And now they're just faces, flattened and smoothed into the gaps in a puzzle far larger than that of Dan Dreiberg's shaky self-concept, of what makes a hero a hero – of how much a life and a place and a home can change between clock ticks.

... but the city _is_ so different, now that its heart's been carved out – it pulses to a different rhythm, something primitive and chaotic and driving. People are dying, every night, under blade and fist and gun, greed and apathy and the giddy love of breaking things just to watch them bleed. They scream for help, for someone, for anyone, and he _could_ be Nite Owl again. He could–

["Do it," pleads a wavering voice from the back of his mind, and Rorschach is standing in the snow disguised as a man named Walter Kovacs, and everything is so, so still – and that's the only imperative he will ever remember, the only command he will ever associate with that sandpaper voice, that sharp jawline, moving under the mask: in the snow on the street in his kitchen in the glow of Archie's dashlights. But the context is wrong. The context will always be wrong.]

but he knows he won't; knows the costume will sit untouched until it goes to pieces with the rest of the world. Knows he will go home tonight and shake, and down aspirin to try to drive away the headaches and coffee to try to keep away the dreams, and fall into arms that feel like an elusive wisp of sanity all wrapped up in something as brittle and breaking as he is. Out here, people will die, but so many already have, and all that remains is a sad, broken-down old chunk of fencing and a million scraps of glossy paper, rustling in the breeze.

"No," he says, shaking his head again and offering up what he's sure looks like an apologetic smile. He thinks of Laurie, curled on his couch, trying so hard to be strong, trying to love him, and he wonders just when he'd gotten so good at faking emotions to plaster over all the hollowed-out blankness. "I'm… I'm not anyone."

He can feel the gaze on his back until he turns the corner, tracing his posture, his cadence, the way he watches nothing but the cracked pavement passing under his feet. Not anyone important. Not anyone–

Then the corner is past, and he's left these pieces of himself behind, pressed them into a greater legacy of loss than he can carry on his own – and wedged between two photographs of heroes who fell as mortal men are the intangible echoes of shouts in a bar and a scream in the cold and a throat between his hands and a bruised and bloodied face under his fists and the endless footfalls of _walking away_ and he knows: Nite Owl is dead, too.

.

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_(c) ricebol 2009_


End file.
